In Hollywood it always rains at funerals.

In St. Albans, it sleets.

It whipped horizontally across the crematorium car-park, peppering the back of Tim’s neck and sliding icy-fingers down the collar of his only clean shirt.  He made his way across to the chapel to join the cluster of relatives gathering around the entrance, stamping their feet on the worn tarmac.  On his approach they all pulled sad faces, offering handshakes and condolences.  There was a delay apparently -- the preceding service had yet to end.  Auntie Maureen was fussing horribly.

“Something to do with the deceased’s last request – six white doves to be released as coffin enters chapel.  ‘Course, when they opened the basket four of them were dead and the other two were on the way out – just flapped about on the steps messing everywhere ... the brother blames a leaky exhaust.”

“Bit like canaries then.” – this was Uncle Vincent, a large man with goldfish eyes courtesy of a dodgy thyroid.

Another elderly gent, sporting an inappropriate trilby, pitched in.

“I don’t think so, Vinnie.  The canary is a colourful bird, whereas your dove is pure white, a symbol of everlasting peace – unless a pigeon gets in the nest, of course, when they go a sort of shitty grey.”

“I mean canaries are sensitive to fumes – that’s why they take them down mines.”

“Was he a miner then, the dearly departed?”

Tim could see this would go on for some time.  In fact it was pretty much the standard of conversation whenever his family got together.  It was why he’d spent most of his life avoiding such gatherings.  He was rescued by the verger, tapping him reverentially on the arm.

“We’re ready for your mother now, Mr. Sanders – if you could ask Mr. Quiggs to reverse the hearse up to the side entrance – just past the bins – we’ll take it from there.  Presuming, of course, the family won’t be bearing the coffin?”

“Not unless you want six more funerals on your hands.”

“Perfectly understood -- do you have a tape?”

Tim was not keeping up, but the verger continued.

“We have facilities for tape or CD – but not, sadly, for MP3 or iPod.  The digital generation rarely pass through our doors, you see – but I’m sure that will all change!”

Realizing he’d got a bit too cheery, the verger re-composed himself.

“A favourite piece of music, perhaps?”

“You’d better check with Mum’s sister, Auntie Maureen -- she’s over there.  The one doing the dying pigeon impersonation.”

*

Maureen had brought a tape.

And so, as the curtains closed on Edith Sanders, albeit rather jerkily, for the final time, it was to the dulcet tones of Englebert Humperdink.

Please release me, let me go.

I know how you feel, Mum.  I know how you feel.

Then, briefly, for the first and only time, he cried.

*

Red-eyed and silent they reconvened in the Garden of Remembrance, amongst the formal rose beds where his mother’s ashes were to be scattered.

“Not straight away, of course.” The verger had been very keen to remind him, “We leave that ‘till the end of the day – it’s all done with the utmost reverence I can assure you.  Unless it’s windy, in which case we hold off for a day or two. We’ve had complaints from the cricket club next door, you see, viz a viz being re-united with their loved ones a little sooner than expected.”

There was genuinely no answer to this, so Tim wandered off to join the others.

“Well, she’ll be in good company!”

The gratingly loud voice was that of his Mum’s cousin Rita, profoundly deaf and – the oldest living relative – slightly bonkers.

“I said she’ll be in good company! They’re all here – Ingrid Bergman, Felicity Kendall, Princess Michael of Kent ...”

“Is Felicity Kendall dead?  When was that then?”

“Lovely bottom, as I recall.”

“Not any more apparently – and you’d have thought Princess Michael of Kent would have chosen somewhere a little more swish as her final resting place – no offence, Tim.”

He stared unwittingly back at the whole mad, twittering bunch of them.

“It’s the roses, Rita!  You’re looking at the names of the roses.  Look, there’s Cardinal Richelieu, for God’s sake... Pam Ayres, Hannah Gordon – they’re just roses everybody – there’s no-one famous buried here.”

“Not Hannah Gordon and Pam Ayres ... it’s like a whole generations been wiped out ...”

He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  So, having done all the crying he was going to do, he settled on the former.

*

He’d never been a latch-key kid – one or other of his parents always reassuringly home.  He’d found the idea quite glamorous of course -- the worn leather key fobs, the freedom to come and go as one pleased, to make cheese toasties without adult supervision.  So, as he walked up the path to his mother’s front door – proudly sanded and revarnished every three years by his father, but now pitted and peeling, unloved for a decade – the key to 114 Langham Crescent felt oddly hot in his hand.

The door still required a knee and an elbow to gain entry – item #127 on a never to be completed list.  A pile of free-sheets and supermarket flyers clogged up the welcome mat, wedging under the door as he pushed against it.

Apart from a few key items, his mother had left everything to him, the house included.  He’d have to sell it, of course.  As shabby as his flat was, nothing would be persuade him to move back.  You might as well take him up the crematorium now.

Auntie Maureen volunteered to handle the sale, mainly because she had her eye on the bedroom curtains and a knee-hole desk that was reputed to be worth a few bob.  Tim had been glad to delegate, telling her she could have what she liked.

“You have a nose round first, Tim, see if there’s any personal bits and bobs you’d like, you know, as a keepsake.  When you’ve done I’ll send Bob round with a van”

Someone had switched off the heating, if the hall radiator was anything to go by.  It must have come as a shock to a house that had been kept at a stifling 26 degrees, day and night, for the last thirty-five years.  Or perhaps it was a relief.  Tim remembered how he was always opening windows, only to find them closed, by an unseen hand, ten minutes later.  His parents were of a generation that remembered cold, unheated houses and they intended to wallow in the luxury of gas central-heating.

Nothing immediately grabbed his attention on the keepsake front, so he decided to take something from each room -- as good a method as any, in the circumstances.  Which is why, ten minutes later he had a small cardboard box containing, among other things, a green rubber egg-timer; a novelty thermometer in the shape of an anchor – a present he’d bought back from a school trip to Germany, dutifully displayed on the mantelpiece in spite of its unredeeming ugliness; a set of brass fire-irons (why?); a tooled leather Radio Times binder, an artifact from a way of life that seemed impossibly distant now, and his old bedside lamp with its hand-painted vellum shade of knights and dragons.

There was one room he’d yet to investigate.

He knew what he’d find there, of course, and it was this certainty that was holding him back.

The attic was accessed by one of those flimsy drop down alluminium ladders – the wooden trap door held in place by an untrustworthy ‘invisible’ catch.  There was a knack to opening it without the whole apparatus clattering down onto your head.  It was a knack he had never acquired, so he stood well back as the steps slid viciously to the floor, then clicked the safety catches into place.

They’d had the attic boarded out the same year they’d fitted loft insulation and now it was quite a workable space.  Though quite why they bothered storing stuff up here was beyond him.  Once an item was designated to the attic it rarely re-surfaced – it was the equivalent of those bunkers at the bottom of the North Sea where they keep all the spent nuclear fuel rods.  A skip would have been cheaper (not for the nuclear waste, of course.  He seemed to recall there was a council by-law against that – along with open fires and garden waste).  No, the attic was for that unique sub-set of items; things you didn’t want but couldn’t throw away.

And in the far corner, next to the swaddled water tank, was the thing that topped the most unwanted, wanted list.

Tim approached the large leather suitcase with his heart in his mouth.  Twenty years of dust had toned down its livid, almost orange, hue – the leather now a more acceptable shade of toffee – but not its totemic potency.  He flipped the heavy brass catches and lifted the lid.

Inside, neatly laid out, were the tools of a trade he’d been trying to forget for the best part of two decades.  Brushes – hogshair and filbert; pastels; metal tubes of oil paint, finger-printed with colour; charcoals and palettes; canvas, stretchers, thinners and an assortment of oily rags.  There was even the faint whiff of turpentine – no more than a memory.  Along with these, a bundle of receipts, handwritten on headed notepaper – Plancher et Fils.  Avignon.  And there, folded in among them, a press clipping.  “Local boy questioned.”  The photograph was terrible, grabbed at the front door – his father trying to block the shot, his mother crying in the background.  A younger version of himself stared out through a student mop of sun-bleached hair – the remnants of a fast fading tan contrasting with the pallor of his mother’s bewildered skin.  His eyes were beseeching, pleading for help – as if asking the Tim of today to rescue the Tim of then.

Then he spotted the letter.

But this was no artifact from his buried past.  It lay on top of the dust and decay, a more recent addition.  The postmark soon confirmed this – 17th February – just a few months old.  It had already been opened – presumably by his mother – the flap folded neatly inside itself.  But it was addressed to him in a hauntingly familiar hand.  He fumbled the letter open and unfolded the single sheet of lilac notepaper.

At the top a name he didn’t recognize.

At the bottom, one he most certainly did.

A single letter ‘D’ .

‘D’ for Danger.

‘D’ for Daphne.

The past crash-zoomed into focus – it was as if the intervening twenty years had just vaporized like so much kettle steam.  He read the half-dozen lines, then read them again, twice, three times.  Each time the fragile, broken sentiment of the letter tore his heart open all over again, along the fault line he had felt sure had healed.  But there it was, as raw and bloody as the day she first pierced it with those distant, parting words of hatred.

*

At what point he actually made up his mind to go back for her, it’s hard to say.  Certainly, as he drove back to the flat, the remnants of the day rescued from grey oblivion by an unexpected sunset, it had struck him that, now, he really did have nothing to lose

He turned things over in his mind.  He couldn’t really blame his mother for trying to conceal the letter from him – she would have been doing it to protect him as much as herself.  He’d never fully explained to them what had actually happened in France, why he had come back in such a rush.  He’d simply fed them the same line he’d given the police officers who’d come to the door that Sunday evening.  He’d spent the best part of six weeks holed-up in his bedroom, skipping meals, staring out of windows – he can’t have been much fun to live with.  So he could well understand why she’d want to keep buried anything that might float to the surface.

Now she was gone and Daphne was back.

Was it too late? Could he be her knight in slightly tarnished armour?  She certainly sounded like she needed someone – why not him?